Tactical Sound Garden [ TSG ] Toolkit“The TSG Toolkit is an open source platform for cultivating public “sound gardens” within urban environments. The Toolkit enables urban dwellers to “plant” sounds within specific locations using their WiFi enabled mobile device.”
TSG
‘Frozen Ark’ to preserve endangered species’ DNA. “A “FROZEN Ark” preserving DNA and tissue specimens from thousands of endangered species could in future be used to create clones of extinct animals, scientists said today.”
Scotsman.com
Massive free Wi-Fi hot spot lands on Paris. “A wireless network is being deployed in the business district of Paris that will give high-speed Internet access to some 150,000 workers.”
ZDNet UK
Online social networks go to work. “But there is growing evidence to support claims that some social networking services (SNS for short) can be a powerful professional ally to businesses — in particular, independent entrepreneurs and smaller companies, for whom each new personal connection is a significant business building block.”
MSNBC
Welcome to vBlog Central. “vBlog Central lets you add video (and audio and pictures) to your existing blog. We host your video content and display it in whatever format your users want. It’s transparent and easy.>
vBlog
Sharp’s Solar-Powered Street Lamp: Lumiwall. “Sharp has unveiled a new street lamp in Japan called the “Lumiwall” that uses solar power and LED arrays to remain entirely off of the electrical grid.”
Gizmodo
MP3 Pioneer Debuts Spatial Sound. “Using a digital pen and a touch-sensitive tablet, a sound engineer drags individual sound elements from one point to another to direct the position of sound elements.”
Wired News
Lab of Tomorrow. “The aim of the partnership is to develop a wearable technology for genuinely useful educational use. The proposed technology will allow high school students to use their every day life as the field where they will conduct sophisticated experiments and thus will deepen their understanding of the science concepts involved in the activities.”
Lab of Tomorrow
Electric cars that pay. “But to really go “green,” some entrepreneurs and academics say, you should try a Volkswagen Jetta. Not just any Jetta. A dark blue one that a California electric-car company has modified so that it not only uses electricity but generates it for other purposes. So, once it’s parked, you plug it in and sell excess electricity to a utility.”
csmonitor.com
SK Telecom Human Ear GPS Kid’s Phone. “The new phones have a built-in GPS unit that will allow parents to track down the location of their kids, even when the phone is turned off.”
Gizmodo
LG’s cellphone for the elderly. “From LG, a brand new cellphone for the elderly with extra large keys that – gasp! – only makes phone calls and sends text messages.”
Engadget
Capability to Achieve 300 Mbps Mobile Broadband Data Rates. “In the field tests Motorola Labs attained data throughputs exceeding 20 Mbps with a latency of just 25 milliseconds while simultaneously demonstrating real-time applications including videoconferencing, multi-Mbps streaming video, and voice over IP and traveling at typical highway speeds (in excess of 100 kilometers per hour or 62 mph).”
Motorola
New Computer Chip Poised to Combat Cell Phone Background Noise. “Their novel dual microphone system–which highlights a speaker’s voice and removes extraneous sounds–could be miniaturized within two years, they say, making it less noisy to reach out and touch someone.”
Scientific American.com
Short stories find a home on the Web. “Short stories, on the other hand, are brief enough to be computer friendly, and at the same time, sufficiently underrepresented in book shops that it can be easier to find a specific work online.”
csmonitor.com
A Precious Moment with iPod mini. “If you look at Apple’s mini lifestyle website, you can see that each color is being marketed to a slightly different space, with the green and pink models being aimed at women, the silver and blue at men, and the gold as a sort of unisex middle ground.”
Gizmodo
ATMs ‘to greet customers by name’. “Within a year, NCR said ATMs will begin offering the usual amount of cash people withdraw and remind them of important information such as when their home insurance is up for renewal.”
BBC NEWS
Motorola unveils a Wi-Fi phone. “Handset maker Motorola on Monday introduced a new phone that it says will switch calls seamlessly between cellular services and wireless Internet networks, potentially offering business customers big savings if the technology works as promised.”
CNET News.com
Portals Ease Dialogue with Suppliers. “For improved performance, stop communicating with your suppliers by fax and phone. Turn to portals and other Web-based methods instead, according to a new supply chain study from the Aberdeen Group.”
EWeek
Teen drivers monitored by Big Brother. “Black boxes and global positioning systems are parents’s best friends when it comes to keep tabs on their teens whereabouts and behaviour while behind a wheel.”
we make money not art
Presto! Your Desk Phone Is A Cell Phone. “Sure enough, next time a call came in on my cell, it rang on the desk phone. I could use that phone to place calls as well. I just dialed as I would on a landline, and the call went out over Cingular’s cellular network.”
BW Online
Ky. Woman Watching Web Cam Helps Nab Fla. Burglars. “Two armed burglars were captured in Volusia County, Fla., Tuesday after a woman in Kentucky — watching a live in-home Web cam — noticed the crime happening and called police…”
local6.com
Airline checks out cell phone check-ins. “Check-in is accomplished by sending a text message up to six hours before a booked flight. A virtual “boarding pass” that includes flight and seat allocation details is then sent to the phone, which must be shown to staff when boarding.”
CNET News.com
VisionStation. “Standard flat-screen applications can display a field of view (FOV) of no more than 60°. The Elumens VisionStation allows for a fully immersive display of 160°. The VisionStation’s ultra-wide FOV creates an amazing sense of space and depth, without need for goggles or glasses. The large size of the VisionStation screen (1.5 meters) also helps promote an excellent sense of immersive 3D.”
Elumens
Geo-Location and Learning. “This is the ability to use the location of a user as the key to determining what content they view through their browser. Open up Google and type the word ‘dentist’. Where you are might determine what results come up on your screen. You might get either a paid listing or a general preference sort for your locale.”
The MASIE Center
Japanese carrier unveils mobile-phone wallet. “To pay you simply wave your cell phone within a few inches of a special display found in stores, restaurants and vending machines around Japan. A fairy-like tinkling sound means your purchase is being deducted from the embedded chip using radio-frequency ID technology. It’s instantaneous.”
USA Today
Virtual Design: As clay fades, GM shifts toward digital imagery
. “The studios allow designers and executives to view three-dimensional, full-sized representations of vehicle designs. Designers can rotate images, change lighting and see surfaces in detail. Design teams in different parts of the world will be able to review and revise projects together at the same time.”
AutoWeek
Siemens to pilot RFID bracelets for health care. “Encoded on the band is patient name, date of birth, gender, and a medical record number, linked to the hospital network that connects the patient record to labs, billing, and the pharmacy.”
InfoWorld
Bag Borrow or Steal. “As long as your membership is active, you may borrow an unlimited amount of handbags from our closet. Keep them for as long as you want! No late fees, no hassles, just great bags!”
bbosweb3.0
81% of Koreans Go Mobile. “The number of mobile phone users in Korea will probably reach 39.43 million, or 81 percent of the population, by 2008.”
Korea Times
Text message classes for over 50s. “Lessons in sending mobile phone text messages have been held for a group of over 50s in Glasgow.”
BBC NEWS
Skype close to launching global Net call service. “Skype Technologies SA, which offers software that allows users to make free phone calls over the Internet, said Friday that it is closer to launching a new prepay service in which users can make cheap calls to any phone around the world from their PCs.”
InfoWorld
File sharing legal, profitable and fair. “With FAIRCOPY you can sell your works on P2P networks and on the Web while reducing piracy risks. You take up to 90% of the earnings and keep complete control over your work.”
FAIRCOPY
City dwellers ‘cuddle’ mobiles. “Londoners create invisible mobile phone booths, while Parisians talk in the middle of the pavement and people from Madrid share their phone with friends.”
BBC NEWS
IBM to provide single sign-on for Orange customers. “IBM Corp. has inked a deal with France Télécom SA ‘s mobile division to create a single sign-on service that will allow some 50 million cellular phone customers to securely access different Web sites and mobile services by logging in just once.”
InfoWorld
Intelligent Milk Cartons. “A Swedish company is developing a new set of cartons that will monitor their own temperature and indicate if their contents are drinkable.”
Engadget
Ford Fiesta ad campaign combines interactive billboards with SMS. “Each passer-by can try their hand at winning a Ford Fiesta by sending an SMS with his/her first name to a short code and indicating the code on the billboard. The billboard then responds to this SMS; displaying an “encouragment to continue” message adressed to the person, and sends him/her another SMS with a question.”
Smart Mobs
New Thinking Hearing Aid Is First Ever to Use Artificial Intelligence to Mimic the Brain’s Natural Ability to Process Sound. “…a new hearing aid with Artificial Intelligence is the first to mimic the brain’s natural ability to automatically detect and optimize speech while turning down the volume on distracting sounds…”
Yahoo News
P2P TV – How Independent News Video Producers Will Bypass The Mainstream TV Networks. “To be a real-time video journalist, all you need is a blog, a camcorder, and a laptop with WiFi.”
RG News
Anonymizes ALL your internet activity!. “Once connected your entire internet traffic will flow through our secure servers making you anonymous. We never pass on your true IP address. We do not keep logs period.”
FindNot.Com
Design Approaches to the High Line Master Plan
. Some great examples of architectural boards that look like representations of data.
Friends of the High Line
Frank Gehry designed concept car. “What’s new is the concept of cars networking with city infrastructure, and thinking of the automobile as a kind of wheeled robot that knows the city…”
Autoweek
Knife-Resistant Garb for Kids. “They may not look cool, but knife-resistant kid’s sweatshirts and coats are the latest products aimed at providing parental peace of mind in a Japan horrified by a series of gruesome attacks on children.”
Reuters.com
Thompson Heralds ‘Decade of Health IT’. “The objectives of the plan are to bring electronic health records into physician offices and hospitals; to build an interoperable health information infrastructure that connects clinicians; to allow increased consumer access to health information; and to improve population health by facilitating public health monitoring, quality of care measurement and clinical research.”
EWeek
We ‘check out’ latest supermarket ‘smart’ cart. “As you shop, you can scan in each item & it will keep a running total of how much you are spending and actually eliminate the need to wait in line at the check-out. You can also check the price of each item before you buy.
As you walk down the aisles, and promotions and paperless coupons ‘pop-up’ on the screen. You can place an order at the deli – from anywhere in the store – and when it’s ready, you receive a notification to pick it up.
MSNBC
RFID-enabled phones to open doors. “The nifty part of this idea is that keys could be digitally generated over the cellular network, enabling you to copy new ones, make temporary keys, and the like.”
Engadget
A fingertap away. “…UbiButton controller is a watch-type device with a chip on the back in contact with your skin; tap your fingertips together lightly and it picks up the shock. By tapping out different patterns (it detects only the shock, not the strength) the idea is that you could turn lights on and off, control appliances, and so forth.”
Engadget
Pigeon-guided tours. “…you go buy a bag of birdseed with some RFID tags mixed in (don’t worry, the pigeons are unharmed by this addition) and feed it to some birds. These birds then fly around the city and activate whatever CCTV cameras they get close to via RFID, with all the video being uploaded to a URL printed on the seed bag.”
Engadget
LIFE CACHING. “…collecting, storing and displaying one’s entire life, for private use, or for friends, family, even the entire world to peruse.”
Trendwatching.com
Battlefield Tech for Aid Workers. “In addition to translating the audio from the news program into English, the e-TAP system presents a synchronized display in a browser that shows the video, the Arabic transcript and the translated English transcript.”
Wired News
Flight 404 | v.7. A series of interesting visualizations using a tool called Processing “built for the electronic arts and visual design communities.”
Flight 404 | v.7
Parents ‘under-estimate’ net risks. “A London School of Economics study suggested 57% had seen net porn but most stumbled on it accidentally via spam or pop-ups.
Only 16% of parents thought their children had seen porn online.”
BBC NEWS
The power of small tech. “…a battery that’s charged by body heat. [...] millimeter-size internal combustion engines that can be manufactured en masse and on the cheap, similar to computer chips. [...] devices that scavenge a building’s subtle ambient vibrations [...] to power tiny wireless sensors.”
Small Times
Solar powered charger for your phone. “Power can be supplied to cellular phones, PDAs, digital cameras, and other handheld electronics by simply changing the connector type.”
TechJapan
E-ink Drawing Pad Closer to Paper. “The device could eventually be used for freehand computer input, including cartoon drawing and adding annotation to documents, according to the researchers.”
TechReview
Venture Firm Develops Wireless Module that Disables Mobile Phone When It is Separated from User. “This means that if a mobile phone user installs the wireless module in the person’s mobile phone and the other in his or her key chain, the mobile phone will never be used by other people if the user has lost it.”
nikkeibp.com
Duke freshmen will be attuned to iPods. “When she arrives Aug. 19, her iPod will be loaded with all kinds of useful information, including orientation schedules, calendars, campus tours, even the Duke fight song.”
newsobserver.com
Aruba Wireless Networks Delivers Painless Wi-Fi to Sharp Healthcare . “We have wireless-enabled intravenous (IV) pumps that automatically gather
essential medication information from a central database to ensure the safety of our patients. This allows us to focus more on patient care, rather than administration…”
TechWeb
BookMachine. “The BookMachine is an automated device that can produce a soft-cover, perfect bound, standard-format book on customer demand within three to five minutes.”
ODMC
New Technology Heralds Unlimited Web Sites. “Cerf said about two-thirds of the 4.3 billion Internet addresses currently available were used up, adding that IPv6 could magnify capacity by some “25,000 trillion trillion times.”"
Yahoo
Changing the Face of Web Surfing. “Web users frustrated by poorly designed sites are increasingly applying that logic to the Net.
Many who are fed up with high-profile design mess-ups are taking it upon themselves to publicly correct conspicuous corporate faux pas, right under embarrassed proprietors’ noses.”
Wired News
Interactive Tele-Journalism. “Interactive Tele-Journalism is a means with which to empower a community with the ability to act in aggregate as the director of a television news program. In a sense it is a merging of concepts relating to online communities, tele-presence, television news and interactive TV.”
walking-productions.com
Will Internet satellite fly?. “This single bird, fixed in space, will let Ottawa attain its goal of bringing broadband Internet access to every community in Canada. But let’s not kid ourselves. When the service is officially switched on this fall, the biggest group to benefit from Anik F2′s ubiquitous broadband coverage will be baby boomers who are fleeing our cities en masse and cocooning themselves in rural homes and upscale cottages.”
TheStar.com
The Shape of Song. “The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see–literally–the shape of any composition available on the Web.”
Turbulence.org
Asia-Pacific | Web aims to standardise alphabets. “A meeting is being held in Malaysia aimed at helping web users who do not use the Western alphabet. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which oversees the system of web addresses and domain names says Asians will make up most of the net’s users within a few years.”
BBC NEWS
Are Ergonomists Really Consulted in Mobile Phone Design?. “Our preliminary studies of the latest phones suggest the buttons are only appropriately sized for five-year olds,” Head told Australia IT. “And if the current trend of shrinking phones continues, soon the buttons will only be big enough for three-year olds.”
Ergonomics Today(TM)
Circular printer. “Using rotational, instead of linear, movement to obtain a truly portable design, printer size is reduced by one-third.”
IDEA 2004 awards
Technology automates giving other drivers the bird. “Wako Corp. is selling this car attachment in Japan as an easy way for motorists there to ‘express gratitude to pedestrians or other motorists’.”
Engadget
Developing RFID-Enabled Phones. “A report by ABI Research predicts that within a few years, as many as 50 percent of cell phones will incorporate RFID chips to enable near field communication.”
RFID Journal
European Copyright Clock Ticking on Elvis Hits. “If there are no changes in European copyright law, the track will fall into public domain Jan. 1, 2005. Anyone will be able to release it without paying royalties to the owners of the master or the performer’s heirs. BMG will start losing a significant piece of its catalog income in Europe. As “That’s All Right” is being hailed by some as the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll, the implications are that every year after 2005, more recordings that defined the genre will fall into public domain.”
Reuters.com
IM taps social networks. “The prototype combines IM with a pair of advanced functions to support the social network-based search process. It contains a more precise and sophisticated user profile than most IM and a referral agent that automatically handles the information-querying process.”
Smart Mobs
UK radio firms to add downloads to the playlist. “By the middle of next year, while you’re listening to Dido, there will be a button that says ‘buy this now,’” said UBC Chief Executive Simon Cole.”
Reuters.com
Nurses Say IT Efforts Ignore Their Needs. “Ninety percent of these nurses said they think tablet PCs are a poor option for bedside nursing because of poor durability, heavy weight, large size, short battery life and high cost. PDAs, on the other hand, are a much more popular mobile device among these nurses.”
EWeek
Crystal-studded Cell Phones. “We know how to lavish your phone with the attention and care it deserves: we only use Swarovski lead crystals and place each stone individually by hand using a custom bonding process that ensures maximum hold and durability.”
nyc peach
blinkx. “blinkx rapidly links you with the information you need from the web, from online news sources and files on your own PC.”
blinkx
Toshihiko Sakai integrated home appliances for ComCom. “One of them is this wall mount triple socket. It has a USB port and a built-in hard disk. You can store music and movies in it and send them to other products in the same product line.”
Reluct.com
Broadband divide on the horizon. “13% of European broadband households in 2003. By 2009 set to rise to 37%. 14% of Greek households will have broadband in 2009. 47% of Dutch households will have mid or high-tier broadband by 2009. 40% of UK households will have broadband by 2009″
BBC NEWS
Inventive wireless providers go rural. “But improved wireless technology has allowed several thousand mostly small Internet providers across the USA to cheaply deliver broadband to remote areas via antennas on hilltops, barns and homes.”
USATODAY.com
Walmart DVD Rental. “We’ll send titles based on availability and the order in which you have arranged them in Your DVD List. As you finish with your DVDs, send it back to us in the prepaid envelope, and we’ll send you the next available title on Your DVD List.”
Walmart.com
(Philippine’s) Justice dept seeks ban of mobile phones in schools. “THE DEPARTMENT of Justice (DoJ) is seeking a ban on mobile phones in schools to stop students from using them for gambling, Secretary Merceditas Gutierrez said Thursday. “This (gambling) has become a very serious problem,” Gutierrez told reporters.”
inq7.net
purSonic. “purSonic soundboards enables walls or ceilings to become acoustic sources for outstanding listening pleasure of speech and music in first-class HiFi quality.”
purSonic
netReplay is watching you. “netReplay monitors, alerts, records, searches, archives, retrieves and replays “the actual content as it was originally seen or heard” by a worker. netReplay not only archives email and their attachments, but also webmail, Instant Messaging, files transferred and an exact copy of the Web pages that each employee has viewed, providing a forensically accurate audit trail.”
The Register
The Great Enterprise IM love-in. “AOL, MSN and Yahoo! are backing an “unprecedented collaborative effort” to support Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005. Using the software, companies can reach customers etc. through all the major IM networks.”
The Register
Do you know the way to Mecca?. “Want to find the direction to Mecca? Need to convert a Gregorian date into the Hijri calendar? Feel like reading the complete Holy Koran in English or Uthmanic? No problem. The Ilkone i800 is a GSM mobile phone created specially for Muslims…”
Engadget
Hi-tech reading aid comes to UK. “…whereas CCTVs use an “x-y table” to move a book or magazine under a camera, myReader captures an entire page and then displays it in a variety of ways.
The result is a totally transformed reading experience, says Pulse Data.”
BBC NEWS
Building a Ubiquitous
Network Society That Spreads Throughout the World (PDF). “an analysis is made of the current status in Japan of realization of a ubiquitous network that allows all users to access and exchange information of any kind freely at any time, from anywhere, and from any appliance through the use of broadband and mobile access as well as intelligent home appliances and RFID tags that can access networks.”
Japanese Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications
tranSticks. “We propose virtually connected media called tranStick. They provide two functions: that of a virtual wire, and that of a memory card containing shared space.”
Sony Interaction Lab
eBay News Roundup. “eBay is conducting a 180-day pilot in the Music category with pre-approved sellers of downloadable digital music files. During the pilot, only pre-approved sellers will be able to list in eBay’s Digital Downloads category.”
auctionbytes.com
Kidnap-wary Mexicans get chipped. “Concha did, however, admit that the principal role of the system was to restrict access to the database centre in an attempt to fight widespread corruption – considered a major factor in the authorities’ lack of success in tackling the kidnap problem.”
The Register
Wristwatch-Style RFID Reader Unveiled. “Information of an object with an RFID can be scanned just by picking up the object. As the task of holding the reader against an RFID is no longer required, efficiency of labor is said to improve.”
NE Asia Online
About MetroNaps. “MetroNaps was born from the realization that many employees spend significant amounts of their day dozing at their desk or catching powernaps in odd places. We seek to be the premier provider of professional nap centers in the United States.”
MetroNaps
Industry Deal Set on Allowing Limited DVD Copying. “A group of media and technology companies including Microsoft Corp. and Walt Disney Co. have agreed in principle to allow consumers to make legal backup copies of next-generation video discs and share their content on portable devices.”
Reuters.com
It’s almost like being there. “By putting people in touch with the actual faces of our loved ones, we experience a much deeper sense of emotional connection with them, because we understand in a way that we simply cannot if we don’t see them, what exactly it is they are feeling. We have a much better understanding of their emotional state.”
csmonitor.com
Biometric Myths: Six Of The Best. “For instance, contrary to common belief, biometric systems are not able to confirm with any level certainty the true identity of a person. Rather, they are able to confirm whether this is the same person that initially enrolled into the system. The person’s true identity is irrelevant to the biometric system.”
HNS
Office Holiday: Co-Workers, Clients Tag Along on Family Vacations . “85 percent of respondents remain accessible to co-workers during nights, weekends and vacations. 76 percent regularly retrieve messages during time off. 54 percent said they sometimes feel “overwhelmed by pervasive communications,” and 93 percent of these people reported a “negative effect on quality of life”.
Avaya
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